Keith Tuma

I Am Not Jow Lindsay

If I were a poet I'd be John Ashbery.
You can hardly hold it against him.
Take me to your butterfly, I'd say,
to every stamen in this stinking town.
I'd be John Ashbery floating downhill,
then uphill towards a poplar tree
in some garden I almost remember
where flowers are all too insolent,
anyway not in bloom. It doesn't matter.
Infinitesimal if not invisible me
would watch myself slipping into
John Ashbery's elegant wrinkled skin
like any germ in this gem of a city.
In New York there's lots to do
even if you want to do it just once
like I want once to be John Ashbery.
It would keep me going that
as I did this and that, the big sweat
of the famous city with its tourists
like cashews dressed in chipotle sauce,
millions of heads jerking around
speaking languages half understood
and pointing cameras smaller than fingers
at somebody who looks like me,
only boggled, uncomfortable at first
in a body lithe and phosphorescent
like John Ashbery's before I met him
or read his poems and thought I wanted
to be John Ashbery.  Once smacked
upside his head by a loser like me
no hero poet can hold on long.
John Ashbery might as well be dead
or surrender the thrills of his obsolete quill,
his dull celebrity to my anonymity.
It's splendid to know he's willing to row
my little boat of the impossible back
to this blah shore and its forgotten
sentimental bandshell. I've set up a mic
to perform my new identity in vapors
I'll exhale while assembling idioms
rich as illegal cigars. It's happiness
I'll smoke in the tweeds of John Ashbery
while up in flames goes melancholy
and the glum serenity I make do with
as the rain rains a little and day turns
to something less like endless night.
It's true.  In the end you can't blame
John Ashbery for writing too much,
or inhabiting some fey little house
of being up a tree like a nut. Nuts.

(forthcoming in Plantarchy  4, 2007)